Design Team Management

Manager. Mentor. Scrum Master. Team Cheerleader

While my primary focus is being an individual designer, I have taken on the roles of being a mentor, manager and scrum master for my teammates and colleagues.

Peer Reviews, not Design Critiques

One of my points that I feel strongly about is rephrasing “design critiques” to “peer reviews”.

I’m of the opinion that “design critique” can sound too harsh, when instead, a “peer review” is much more neutral in tone and is exactly what it says it is: a review done by peers.

My emphasis in conducting peer reviews is to gather more ideas and information about a design proposal, and to encourage questions as a pathway towards discussion. Peer reviews should be thought of as discovery sessions, as opposed to a defense session.

Questions, questions, questions!

My advice to any designer is to always ask questions… then ask more questions!

The more you talk with your product managers or engineers, the more information you’ll gain!

During my time as a Design Lead & Manager, I onboarded 4 new employees. My approach as a manager is to meet my employees as equals, and to encourage them in their work, help through any frustrations, and celebrate their successes. I believe in working with employees to understand how they work the best, and then doing what I can to give them what they need to be successful and satisfied in their work.

Start Simple & Focused

I built my own onboarding program for my incoming employees, and one of the most important (and hopefully most fun) tasks was what I called a Design Warm-Up.

To help my new employees familiarize themselves with our design system and our technical system, I would present them with the employee profile page in our product. The new designers had 2 design tasks to complete:

1. Re-create the employee profile page exactly as it is - this was meant to give the new hires a chance to play with the design system and learn about the components that were available to them

2. Re-design the employee profile page however you’d like! - this exercise gave new hires a chance to explore and stretch, and then to also learn the constraints of our technical platform

In both tasks, there was no right or wrong way to complete the designs - no matter what was presented, we could use the designs as an opportunity to learn more about our design system and technical platform.

Planning & Work Management

Part of being a manager was helping my team with breaking down projects into manageable sizes and formulating a work plan. This involved understanding the full scope and timeline of the project, then breaking down what work needed to be down and planning it accordingly. On some projects, this work was planned week by week.

When restructuring happened within my department and a small design team was formed, I took on the role of being the Scrum Master for the Services Industries UX Team.

As the Scrum Master, I conducted the following activities:

• Arranged sprint ceremonies

  • Weekly team stand-ups

  • Sprint Planning

  • Sprint Demos

  • Sprint Retrospectives

• Prepared Sprint Summaries

• Created future sprints

• Created and planned tickets in sprints based upon need & priority